Wheat Field With Crows
by venusianeye
Summary: Miharu cannot escape into a Van Gogh painting.  AU.


The prairie stretches on and on, a Van Gogh of yellows, greens, and sunbleached whites. Here, under an empty blue sky, lies the end of the world: silent and still, a peace delicate enough to vanish in the breeze, dry enough to be swallowed in an instant by hungry flames, and too vast, too placid, to be disturbed by men. Their house - thin walls, one room and twelve floorboards - is not quite at the end of the world. It is simply teetering on the brink of nonexistence.

He found Yoite curled up like parchment, thin and pale between two large clumps of seven-foot prairie grass, entirely by accident. If Miharu had blinked at the wrong time, he would have missed him completely. The apparent serendipity of this discovery roused the cagey, specific wariness of the twice-bitten and twice-burned - Miharu's scars are all on the inside but that doesn't mean he forgets them. He almost left Yoite lying there. Almost.

But there was, after all, room in the cart. So Miharu arranged his sleeping princess/prince on top of the dried beans and eventually, the borrowed mule pulling in front, Miharu pushing from behind, he brought Yoite back to his non-castle and placed him where such somnolescent characters are intended to lie - i.e., the bed. And then he brought the mule inside for the night and barred the door, because he heard the screaming and howling of wild things much less tamer those in fairy tales.

Yoite slept like the dead, but he woke up the next morning on his own, no kiss of life required, and stared at the floor for six tense hours until Miharu offered him food and told him he didn't care much whether Yoite was a human or if he fell from the sky, but he'd like a hand bringing in the corn. Being given something to do was, for Yoite, like giving a spark to dry tinder, and he began to chatter, filling Miharu's long silences with questions and nonsensical non sequiturs.

It's probably the nicest summer Miharu has ever had, not that he would ever admit it.

"Why are you out here, Miharu?" he asks, bright blue eyes guileless. He'll believe anything Miharu tells him.

"I'm just escaping for a little while," Miharu says, broodily remembering the rude shock of human betrayal, tying another bundle of corn ears to the rafter. "I figure I'll have to go back someday. Hold the ladder still."

"I used to have a different name," Yoite continues, frank and earnest. "I used to live somewhere else. I didn't like it, though, so don't worry, I don't want to go back."

Miharu wonders sometimes if Yoite might be a changeling, a sprite of some kind - there's an ethereality about him, thin hipbones peeking out between Miharu's old trousers and Miharu's longest flannel shirt, that Miharu can't seem to pin down, like brushing against a moth in the darkness and catching only dust. "Good," he says, climbing steadily back down the wooden rungs, privately laughing at Yoite's concern. "I'll need help making preserves."

Another day in late July - too beautiful to work, the morning after a monsoon, everything green and flowering and stunning enough for Miharu to begrudge it the muttered adjective "pretty" - Yoite leaves beans to soak for dinner and then gathers, in the apron MIharu gave him, a rioting mosaic of flowers. Violets, wild roses, Saint John's Wort, countless others that Miharu doesn't recognize.

"Did you ever notice how the sky is darkest in the middle?" Yoite asks, and MIharu doesn't say a thing, just chews on a long stalk of grass and watches the blue dancing in Yoite's eyes. For a few weeks after that, they eat little pastries with petals kneaded into the dough, and Miharu admits that the drying roses make the house smell nice.

July sticks to August like hotcakes on the pan, bringing with it a windfall of beech nuts by the closest lake and ripening wheat. The weather is getting crisp - Miharu can smell it in the air, and so he takes Yoite out to the small field where he planted squash. Yoite is delighted by the colors of pumpkins.

"This one has scars all over it," he says, pointing out one particularly unfortunate specimen. "Like you and me, huh?"

"It's probably still good on the inside," Miharu says, stubbornly resistant to being drawn into a simile.

Yoite pauses, looking oddly forlorn, his silken black hair framing the hollowness of his face. "All of my scars are on the outside," he says, staring at the field, "because the inside is empty."

"Come on, let's move some of these indoors," Miharu says, wondering what would happen - if the feelings in his chest would escape - if he reached out to grasp Yoite's empty hands.

And then, one cold morning Miharu wakes up to the sound of Yoite coughing, his long cornstalk body bent in half. He knows, then, lying with his face to the wall, what the white translucence of Yoite's lacerated skin means. That is the morning of the day that Yoite's chatter slows to a trickle, eventually drying up.

"Should I send for a doctor?" Miharu asks when he can't stand the silence any longer.

"You know," Yoite tells him, holding a rag bloodied with his wracking coughs between bruised fingertips, "for the longest time I thought we were both already dead." He pauses, his thin lips purple with the early autumn cold, even though he's wrapped in both blankets, and then shuts his eyes to the world. "I was so happy."

He does not speak again.

Reality and the tiny nuances of being alive: These things adhere to Miharu's soul like unpleasantly warm taffy, pulling him in and leaving a sticky patina on his mind, but Yoite - skeletal, now, and blue-white pale - is moving ever closer to the edge, teetering on the brink of nonexistence. The barrier between summer and autumn - between Yoite and death - is as thin as a blank sheet of paper.

Miharu lets the wheat rot in the fields, fattening more than a few deer - he spends so much time watching Yoite, looking after him, that he begins to breathe in sync with him, wake when he wakes. External time loses all meaning; all that matters is the length of Yoite's dwindling life, ebbing out of him not in gusts but gentle sighs.

One night, slumped over the bed in sheer exhaustion, Miharu wakes up to the feeling of Yoite's fingers running tenderly though his hair, soothing and thankful. "Goodbye, Miharu," Yoite whispers.

And then, suddenly, the fairy tale is over, and Miharu finds himself alone at the end of the world. Ashes to ashes.

He was ready at last, here on the edge of everything, to reach out and take someone's hand, but he has grasped only dust.

It snows that day. Miharu's scars are all on the inside, and he's not sure there's anything else left but the scars.

As though the universe is trying to make a point, a week later Thobari comes for him, tying two horses to the fence that surrounds the vegetable garden. He barges noisily in through the door, feet muddy with slush. "Rokujou!" he says, and it is far too loud, almost obscene to disturb the grave silence. "What the hell? Have you been out here playing cowboy the whole time?"

Miharu is angry for a moment that Thobari has interrupted his slow process of wasting away - angry enough to kill him, and it is that fury that finally shakes him awake from his deadly lethargy.

"Not... exactly. Why are you here?" he croaks, his unused voice rusting at the edges, trying to remember why the hell he should care.

"I've been tracking you down for months. We need you, Miharu," Thobari says, grimly. "Haven't you ever heard that 'with great powers come great responsibilities'?"

The sight of the man is at once jarringly familiar and completely out of place. In this place - this memory trap of questions never asked, of chances never taken, of complete and utter anhedonia, he is far too much alive.

"Once or twice," Miharu demurs, already knowing that he's going to have to leave with Thobari eventually - Thobari who is now bustling around the inside of the house, looking for something quick to cook. Thobari who, bizarrely, coaxes him into laughing until he dissolves into hurt, angry sobs, and who doesn't understand anything at all.

The day they leave, Miharu stares at the sun-bleached, snow-blanketed wooden walls of a house that no longer belongs to anyone, and leaves the prairie for good, returning to something that everyone else agrees is 'civilization'.

Miharu is, after all, a future king; and he will one day be obliged to marry a princess, a real princess, not a whip-thin child left to die in the wilderness. This is not a fairy tale and he cannot escape into a Van Gogh painting; and there is only room for love on the outskirts of the universe in a house that he will never come back to.

He shuts his eyes, burning the last image into himself, and then he leaves. Indoors, arranged into careful bundles by diligent white hands, roses hang dry from the rafters.

* * *

A/n: I'm sorry. ;A; It was a drabble that got out of control!


End file.
